The invention relates to document cards and more particularly to hopper mechanisms for holding such cards from which the cards may be fed one by one for subsequent processing.
It has previously been common practice to feed document cards serially or longitudinally from both the top and the bottom of vertical stacks of such cards. Such cards are provided with punched openings through them, and the punching deforms the paper of the cards slightly in the direction in which the punching is done, leaving slight projections or extrusions around the peripheries of the openings. These projections in successive cards fed longitudinally from a stack tend to cause interlocking of the cards and tend to prevent a sliding movement of an end card from the stack; and this interlocking action is particularly pronounced when the bottom card of a vertical stack is fed, since the stack weight forces the deck of cards onto the bottom card that is being fed.
Where, from he design of a document card machine, it is desired tht the bottom card of a card stack be fed, this has also been done by first feeding the card from the bottom of the stack transversely to a cornering station and then feeding the card longitudinally for subsequent operations on the card. Due to the shape of the punched openings, a transverse feeding of a card from the stack does not result in an interlocking of the extrusions around the punched holes of the cards; and the interlocking problem is thus solved but at the cost of increased complexity of the machine.